Catalog & Archive recommendations

Having searched this forum, I've found differing recommendations for these two activities. Can you advise on how
you
find it best to carry them out?

CATALOGING - I've seem many recomendations for Imatch, as well as PS Album & numerous other ones.

ARCHIVING - The package that gets the clearest recommendation seems to be PictureFlow.

It strikes me that a good package might be able to do both (so have you found Imatch or PS Album good at archiving to CD or DVD then allowing easy retreival?).

I also wondered if it would make sense to catalog my images first, then archive them (eg. using both of the above packagaes).

Finally, I guess that Hard Disk space must run out eventually (especially if I continue using RAW) so it will make sense to
move
some files of the PC and onto CD or DVD. Can these packages cope with indexing something that is now "offline"?